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The Most Important Takeaways from the FDA’s Big Covid-19 Vaccine Meeting

Distribution and winning over public trust will be major challenges

Emily Mullin
Medium Coronavirus Blog
5 min readOct 23, 2020

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Photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

On Thursday, a committee of vaccine experts met for the first time to discuss standards that would need to be met in order for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use. Such committees are assembled to advise the FDA any time the agency is considering a new drug or vaccine.

During the more than eight-hour-long virtual meeting, representatives of vaccine companies spoke about their progress, government scientists addressed plans to allocate a vaccine, and members of the public voiced their concerns about potential Covid-19 vaccines.

Read about the questions that remain after the meeting here.

The panel, made up of mostly academic scientists, didn’t discuss any specific vaccines yesterday but will meet again to review applications from vaccine makers, which could come in as soon as November. We rounded up some of the major takeaways from the meeting.

The FDA reiterated that it won’t lower the bar for Covid-19 vaccines

President Trump’s determination to have a vaccine before Election Day on November 3…

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Medium Coronavirus Blog
Medium Coronavirus Blog

Published in Medium Coronavirus Blog

A former blog from Medium for Covid-19 news, advice, and commentary. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Emily Mullin
Emily Mullin

Written by Emily Mullin

Former staff writer at Medium, where I covered biotech, genetics, and Covid-19 for OneZero, Future Human, Elemental, and the Coronavirus Blog.

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